AUBURN, Alabama – It wasn't so long ago that Mark Richt occupied the hot seat where Auburn's Gene Chizik sits today. How long ago? Try various times last season. That's when the Bulldogs, coming off a 6-7 season in 2010, started 0-2.

Georgia won its next 10 games last year and now Richt and the Bulldogs will claim a spot in the SEC Championship Game if it beats Auburn in Jordan-Hare Stadium on Saturday. If that happens, Auburn will match its worst-ever record in the SEC at 0-7.

Hot seat? Mark Richt knows about it.

"It is kind of a roller coaster, and sometimes you do go up and down, and you just don’t know how close you might be to having a really good football team if you’re just patient for one more year," Richt in a transcript of his weekly press conference Tuesday. "I think a lot of teams go backwards because they make changes when maybe they are on the verge of something good happening, and then if you make change and you start over again, it’s hard for all the cumulative reps that you’ve had to all of sudden blossom. I would imagine it’s hard to try to figure out as a decision maker if that team is close or if they are not."

Auburn is 2-7. Last year, the Tigers were 8-5. The year before that, they were 14-0. Richt was still praising the Tigers on Tuesday.

"There is truly a very, very fine line between winning and losing," Richt said. "There are a lot of good teams in our league in my opinion that still might have a losing record in league play. You lose some close games and sometimes you win the close games. Sometimes you get a break here or there and you grab momentum, and it serves you well for the rest of the year, and sometimes you don’t ever find it.

"Obviously I’ve been coaching going into 12 years now, and it is a very fine line. Even the year we went 6-7, how much of a different team did we have than some of the teams that might have gone 10-2? Probably not a whole lot different. Not making a play here or making a bad decision there as a coach or the other team just making a play that day. It’s not all that mind-boggling to me because it’s just a really tough league."

Richt says it all comes with the business.

"You just understand that’s the way it is and that’s why you have to keep believing in what you do. You have to keep grinding," he said. "You have to keep evaluating what you do, because if you need to make change, you need to make change. If you need to recruit differently or train differently in the offseason or try to do something different schematically, you have to always be looking for ways to get better on a yearly basis. But I think if you just totally abandon what you believe in and try to be something you’re not, then you’re done."